WordPress Plugin Development Resources and Tutorials

WordPress is the most-deployed content management system on the planet. There are a number of reasons that it is so popular: it is easy to use, easy to host, free, and open source. A major driver of its popularity is plugins.

WordPress is extremely extensible. With a plugin, you can add nearly limitless functionality to your site. There are thousands of high-quality free and premium WordPress plugins available. But, sometimes, you need something really custom. Building a WordPress plugin gives you the ability to make exactly the features you need for your site.

If you have a little bit of coding background, or are willing to learn some PHP, building your own WordPress plugins isn't that difficult. To help you out we've collected the best tutorials on the subject, along with links to helpful resources and important tools for plugin developers.

Introductory Tutorials on Plugin Development

These articles, tutorials, and courses provide a general introduction to developing a plugin for WordPress. They approach the topic from different angles, and assume differing levels of prior coding experience — so try a few until you find the one that makes sense for you.

Create a Custom WordPress Plugin from Scratch describes the process of creating a plugin that fetches product information from an external database and displays it randomly on your site. Some knowledge of PHP coding is useful before getting started.

Wordpress Plugin Tutorial is an easy to follow tutorial with lots of commentary and explanation, showing you how to build a plugin that displays Google Analytics data inside a post edit screen.

WordPress Plugin Development Tutorial is a 12-unit tutorial that covers a number of things not mentioned in many other introductory-level tutorials: internationalization, activation hooks, testing, and asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX). This tutorial might be a good fit for you if you've found most of the other "Beginner" guides too shallow, but you're still not quite sure how to get a full-scale plugin off the ground.

How to Write a Wordpress Plugin is a 12-part tutorial covering important facets of plugin development, including reasons to write plugins and how to get ideas for plugins, along with more practical issues like using AJAX and building admin panels.

An Introduction to WordPress Plugin Development is exactly that — an introduction, not an in-depth tutorial. Still, this article gives a very clear view of what a plugin does and how they work, so it is worth a read if you are just getting into plugin development.

How to Build a WordPress Plugin is a good introduction to plugin development, with lots of screen shots, code samples, and additional resources. Really good for visual learners and people who haven't spent a lot of time staring at code.

How To Create A WordPress Plugin provides a straightforward, but pretty basic, overview of what it takes to build a plugin. This is a good introduction if you're trying to figure out whether you are up to the task of building a new plugin, but you'll need other resources to really figure out how to do it.

WordPress Plugin Development from Scratch is a five-part walk-through explaining plugin development, aimed at people with some web design (HTML/CSS) experience, but with little or no PHP or WordPress knowledge.

WordPress Development track is a 12-course, 21-hour track on WordPress development from premium tutorial provide Tree House. If you want to really dig into plugin (and theme) development for WordPress, this is a great series to work through.

Additional Tutorials and Learning Material

Once you have a decent handle on plugin development in general, check out these resources, which will help take you from novice to master plugin developer.

Professional WordPress Development: Environments covers setting up a local development environment, a testing and staging and environment, syncing with production, and why you should bother with having some many different environments in the first place.

PHP the Right Way is not specifically about WordPress development, but is a reference on writing good PHP code. No matter how many WordPress-development tutorials you work through, you won't get really good at building plugins and themes for WordPress until you master PHP. You can find more resources for improving your PHP skills on our PHP Developer Resources page.

Reference

Plugins is the official reference on plugins from the WordPress Codex. This page is about plugins in general, from a site administrator viewpoint. Even though it isn't about development, it should be required reading for plugin developers, since it lays out what WordPress users should expect.

Developer is a WordPress plugin that provides a number of useful debugging and logging tools, helping to optimize your development experience.

WP Test is a large set of test content that can be imported into a WordPress installation.

Debug Bar is a plugin that provides information about performance, queries, and caching each time a WordPress page loads.

hookr.io is an index of hooks and filters in WordPress core and popular themes and plugins. The index is integrated into a plugin that augments live pages with information about hooks and filters that were activated on page load.

VCCW is a Vagrant+Chef virtual environment designed for WordPress plugin and theme development.

Synchi is a WordPress plugin that provides a full IDE (integrated development environment) inside the admin code editors.

Fieldmanager is a toolkit for creating complex administration screens in WordPress plugins.

GenerateWP is a set of code generators for creating customized boilerplate. Plugin developers can use it to generate code for custom post types, custom taxonomies, shortcodes, widgets, hooks, and metaboxes.

Roots is a suite of tools that provide a high-quality, modern platform for WordPress development. It includes a local server stack and a development-oriented WordPress distribution.

Books

Digging Into WordPress (2009-Present), by Coyier and Starr, is a book and blog. It is the best, most in-depth written resource on WordPress there is. If you can only buy one book on WordPress, this is it. The blog is worth reading also, as it covers a wide variety of WordPress development related topics.

Summary

There are lots of good reasons to learn to build WordPress plugins. If you're just starting to learn to code, building WordPress plugins can give you a practical project to work on that isn't too complicated or too simple. If you you WordPress a lot yourself, you can build plugins to solve your own problems and create the features you wish you had. Finally, you can build WordPress plugins professionally. No matter how many free plugins there are, someone is always looking for something that isn't available. Lots of people make a living building plugins for WordPress.

Further Reading and Resources

We have more guides, tutorials, and infographics related to WordPress:

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